B.6 Comparison of MySQL Enterprise Backup and InnoDB Hot Backup

In terms of features, the MySQL Enterprise Backup product is a superset of the InnoDB Hot Backup
product that it supersedes:

The mysqlbackup command, a cross-platform
replacement for the innobackup command, is
now available on Windows. Windows users can back up tables
from other storage engines besides InnoDB, such as MyISAM
tables, without writing their own wrapper scripts.

The mysqlbackup command now includes all the
capabilities of the former ibbackup
command, making that command obsolete.

This documentation refers to the mysqlbackup
command exclusively.

The mysqlbackup command is a C program
connecting to the server through the MySQL API, rather than a
Perl script that runs the mysql command.
Because it does not run the actual mysql
command, it does not support the
--mysql-extra-args option of the
innobackup, but otherwise the syntax is
compatible.

If this implementation change presents any issues for former
users of the InnoDB Hot Backup product (for example, if you customized the
innobackup script or relied on specific
mysqld options passed through the
--mysql-extra-args option), please submit
requirements against the new mysqlbackup
command.

Currently, the old ibbackup and
innobackup commands are still supplied as
aliases or copies of the mysqlbackup
command. When mysqlbackup is run under these
names, it accepts the same old option syntax from those
commands. This backward compatibility is for troubleshooting
in case of upgrade issues as you transition to the
mysqlbackup command.

Note

Starting in MySQL Enterprise Backup 3.7.1, the innobackup
and ibbackup commands that are aliases of
the mysqlbackup display warning messages
when you use them. These aliased commands are expected to be
removed in a future release.

Backups produced by the InnoDB Hot Backup product can be restored by the
MySQL Enterprise Backup product.

Support for the Barracuda file
format is new to MySQL Enterprise Backup. Once you upgrade your database
servers to MySQL 5.1 with the InnoDB Plugin, or MySQL 5.5 and
higher where support for the new file format is built in, you
need to use MySQL Enterprise Backup to ensure you can back up all InnoDB tables.

The MySQL Enterprise Backup product includes some new performance optimizations,
such as the posix_fadvise() system call.

The mysqlbackup command has extra
flexibility for specifying the MySQL connection information.
It can read the user, password, port and socket options from
the [client] group of your default or
user-specified configuration file. If you supply the
--password option without an argument, you
are prompted to enter the password interactively.

The optimization within the ibbackup
command that skipped copying unused space within InnoDB
tablespace files, is available within
mysqlbackup only in combination with the
--compressed option. Use compressed backups
if this storage overhead is significant for your data.